Infrastructures and phantasmagrams of inclusions that exclude: international student assessments

ABSTRACT

The article is a diagnostic of how science ‘thinks’ as a mode of reasoning and space of action about inclusive education. Attention is given to the comparative reason generated in the Organization for Economic, Co-operation and Development’s (OECD)’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The infrastructure or architecture of the assessment is an exemplar of a science designed to provide practical knowledge for producing inclusive educational systems. Examined is the grid of calculative practices as producing patterns of recognition and expectations of experience that compare and differentiate nations, societies, and people. The calculations, however, are not merely descriptive. They embody desires as normative inscriptions of who students are, should be, and the dangerous populations threatening the imagined future. The calculations are likened to the seventeenth century projection machines of the magic lanterns, phantasmagrams of an inclusive education that distributes differences that exclude and abject. The comparing of people appears as non-polemical benchmarks, competences, literacies, and well-being organised as ‘highways’ of data to activate in policy and professional practices. The study of PISA is not a critique of science, per se; but of the historical impracticality of an infrastructure that reinscribes inequalities as its method to correct social wrongs.

KEYWORDS:

• Science studies
• inclusions/exclusions
• infrastructures
• international assessments
• political sociology of knowledge

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Declaration of competing interests

There are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 I want to acknowledge different people who helped as I tried to bring together different historical fields of thought: Matthew Beland, Amanda Fowler, Chushan Wu; and to the editors of the Special Issue, Christian Ydesen and Harry Daniels.

2 For example, the OECD report (2015) on Swedish education provides measures of the relation of equity and quality.

3 The concern with sciences imagined as practical and useful for school improvement, reform and correcting social wrongs, see Popkewitz (2020). To visualize how the epistemic principles of this kind of research travels globally and settles in different research communities related to education, see, e.g., Lindblad et al. (2021).

4 The notion of center does not refer to a physical place but the congealing of different practices into a determinant space to “seeing” and acting on events-people, society, and “things”.

5 Normativity directs attention to the rules and standards in which historically particular sets of values and norms are generated to form a moral order. For a discussion of normativity, social order, and orders of “nature,” see Daston (2018/2019).

6 The broader field of social science in which forms of this infrastructure operates is related to the analytics of modernity in which representations form as origin and essences of identities. Eurocentric is often used as a concept that represents this mode of reasoning and universalizes as The West, modernity, and the Enlightenment rather than a particular onto-epistemic formation, enclosures and internments I explore the historical specificity of this notion related to science (Popkewitz, Diaz, and Kirchgasler 2022), and more broadly the entanglements of the European Enlightenment in post/anti-colonial and critical studies in Zhao, Popkewitz, & Autio (2021); and Popkewitz & Huang (2023).

7 I am drawing on Ahmad (2004) notion of affective economy concerned with how emotions are generated in external surfaces that create boundaries between self and others. My interest maintains different loci in concerns with infrastructures and centers of calculations.

8 This notion of modernity in relation the European and North American cosmopolitanism is discussed in Popkewitz 2008.

9 I draw on the notion of center of calculation and space of action from Latour (1987). Latour uses the terms to speak of the entangled complexities related to Action Network Theory as generative terms about science in its social (intra)actions. I have picked up this generative quality from this work and intellectually play with it in a manner that is different from Latour. My interest is more focused on the onto-epistemic qualities produced- knowledge systems generated, the comparative reasoning inscribed, and the principles generated about people and the distribution of differences.

10 This imagined future is explicit in OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 (OECD 2019a).

11 Some competences are: “Taking responsibility: Considering the ethics of action”, “engage in open, appropriate and effective interactions across cultures”, global competence “the builds on cognitive and social emotional skills”.

12 That sentiments of a global attachment and affiliation, however, are not necessarily global, but specific historical enactments that travel and reassembled in different historical social and cultural settlements.

13 I am borrowing these phrases from the work of Berger, Berger, and Kellner (1974) and Savage (2010) but historically and theoretically using in different ways.

14 “Modern” is thought of a historical notion about modes of seeing and thinking that are visible in the long 19th century. It is not a normative but historical notion.

15 The American War on Poverty and The Great Society entailed this remodeling of the welfare state in which the social sciences were important as providers of the desired expertise.

16 This framing of patterns of recognition is discussed in Popkewitz (2008; 2020); and see, Rose (1989); Danziger (2008).

17 As Danziger (2008) reminds us, all human societies remember, but they remember in very different ways. The infrastructure discussed, then, is to create a historical specific reasoning to remember.

18 The administration of large data sets through mass observational techniques was involved in the remodeling of the welfare state after World War II and the formation of international agencies, such as The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization; the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); and the First International Mathematics Study (FIMS); now called TIMSS between 1945 and the 1960s (Elde Mølstad and Pettersson 2019).

19 This is discussed in Popkewitz (2020).

20 Cybernetics, a revisioning of earlier systems theories, was brought into the human sciences during the 1950s and 1960s (see, e.g., Halpern 2014; Hayles 1999; Popkewitz, Pettersson and Ksiao, 2021).

21 I realize the irony of examining systems as a concept deployed through numbers and talking about systems of reason. My excuse is twofold. First, the notion of systems of reason is a notion of system concerned with coherence that is given historically through the interpretative practices of the overlapping of different trajectories that has no theology or single origin. Second, the attempt to give coherence to different things that do not necessarily seem related requires, at least at the surface level, some applying sets of relations or notion of system.

22 Frequentist statistics is the technique that applies probability to existing data sets, such as the probability in flipping heads on a coin. Bayesian statistics is a method that enables the continuously updating existing knowledge as they relate to an event to develop a conditional probability. The latter becomes more important with the increased computer power to deal with larges sets of data, such as related to finding preferences of people through Google or Amazon searches.

23 Such distinctions are national differences graphed between percent of education linking students to employment opportunities, school-based collaboration, and self-evaluation to performance levels of students who enter secondary school by ethnic groups.

24 This notion of professionalism is not merely that of the assessment but found in contemporary research on teacher improvement and teacher education (see, Popkewitz 2020a).

25 Literacy as affect is discussed in Popkewitz, Diaz, and Kirchgasler 2022.

26 The onto-epistemic inscriptions of normalcy and pathology haunt the social sciences and psychologies but enunciated with a specificity through the assemblages and connections in the assessment (Popkewitz 2008, 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This is to acknowledge that there is no financial or non-financial interest from the direct applications of this research.

Notes on contributors

Thomas S. Popkewitz

Thomas S. Popkewitz is a Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, The University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA. His studies are concerned with the cultural politics of education knowledge and its comparative reason. These studies focus on the social epistemology of curriculum, pedagogy and research as practices creating kinds of people (e.g. the citizen, the learner, the child left behind) that distribute differences (the achievement gap) to exclude and abject. Recent studies focus the impracticality of practical research for enacting its social commitments; examining the comparative reason inscribed the curriculum, teacher education, and research as phantasmagrams about societies and people.